BKLVYRJB.RVW 931124 O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. 103 Morris Street, Suite A Sebastopol, CA 95472 800-998-9938 707-829-0515 fax: 707-829-0104 info@ora.com "Love Your Job", Powers/Russell, 1993, 1-56592-036-8 Work. Don't talk to me about work. Brain the size of a planet and they've got me reviewing this book. It's so depressing. The book is an unusual one. There are chapters, but these serve only as loose divisions between collections of short essays (almost all of which are less than a page in length.) This appears to have some significant advantages over the normal type of self-help book. Since the essays are so short, a great number of them can be included, making this a kind of distillation of every motivational book and seminar out there. On the other hand, because the topics change so fast you don't get hung up mentally arguing with a given statement. The promotional blurbs for the book keep repeating the word, "practical." There is much to support such an assessment. Chapter two, "What does it mean to love your job?" raises the issues of job satisfaction and job match through more than two dozen avenues, via essays and exercises. This shotgun approach would likely work with people who had never seriously considered the issue before, much better than would a direct confrontational approach. For anyone who has had even a decent overview of psychology, however, there is nothing new here. Self-analysis, skills inventories, visualization, perseverance, and openness have all been proposed before. Ultimately, the book stops short of the most difficult areas. An exercise assessing one's fear of success cited from another work, concludes by saying that if you answer yes to more than a few questions you should follow the other author's advice. Said advice is not listed. Chapter three discusses maintaining a good job fit. Here again, the material is lacking in drama. In this case, however, that is not a bad thing. Maintenance is less dramatic and urgent. The practicality of the material remains high, and that is of more importance in this kind of topic. Much of the contents remind one of Tom Peters' repeated cry of, "Train, train, train! And when you've finished ... retrain, retrain, retrain!" Equally good advice from either source. Powers is very fond of quotes, so I'll give him one. "Lord, give us the strength to change what must be changed, the patience to endure what can't be changed .. and the wisdom to know the difference." Chapter four, "What if you don't have a job you love?" is basically about job searches. It is at this point that the triteness of the book's advice goes beyond aggravation. The essays are still the little upbeat pep talks that advised readers with jobs to look around at other work or to expand their skill sets. In chapter one, Powers' writing seemed refreshingly free from the arrogance of the motivational speaker crowd, and even mentioned the difficulty of an economy where many don't even *have* jobs. In chapter four, one of the blue bordered "exercise" pages is a slightly sarcastic and oft reprinted "application" for a college, listing all the improbable feats the applicant has accomplished without it. Some years back, British Columbia had a crisis in education. Thirty percent of the teachers then working lost their jobs over a three-year period. In the aftermath, I was conducting seminars in computing at the Unemployed Teachers' Action Centre. I very well remember one attendee. In contrast to the usual casual attire, he was neatly turned out in slacks and sports jacket. He was active and involved throughout the seminar, and personable with his fellow students as well. The model of everything they tell you in employment seminars. He stayed after the class, and we got to talking about alternative careers and job searching. With no warning, he broke down into sobbing, wracking tears. Although he was following all the right rules, six months had gone by without a single ray of hope, and he was internally shattered, regardless of how well he seemed to be coping on the outside. Powers would have nothing to offer this man. Although he speaks of Seligman's, "Learned Optimism," Powers seems to be completely ignorant of Seligman's earlier, and seminal, "Learned Helplessness." Months, and even years, of firing off applications without response do a very thorough job of "teaching" the unemployed that they are useless--and that job searching is useless, too. In this situation, the simplistic advice handed out by society, friends and family--and echoed by Powers--says that not only are they useless, but they are stupid as well, and have to be taught the most basic of ideas. The last chapter, "Is there life outside your job?" took me rather by surprise. It is a miscellany of self-help topics, mostly around the ideas of balance and taking time out. Where the first two major chapters of the book concentrate on "Set your sights high," "Give it all you've got," and "Go for it," the last two pull back with, "Don't set your sights too high," "Hold something back," and "Well, nothing's perfect, maybe you're OK where you are." There is no attempt to balance any of this. There are few considerations of other outlets, such as non-business hobbies, participation in professional organizations or volunteer work. The book ends with a good annotated bibliography of employment and motivational books and resources. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1993 BKLVYRJB.RVW 931124 ====================== DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" (Oct. '94) Springer-Verlag